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Kulbhushan Jadhav Sentence: Reading the Analysts

Husain Haqqani has written a ‘must read’ analysis of the Kulbhushan Jadhav affair. As usual, the former Ambassador makes many important observations, particularly about how the ‘military-intelligence combine wants to ensure the primacy of its worldview at least within Pakistan’. This is becoming more and more obvious in the aftermath of GHQ’s announcement of the verdict against Jadhav.

Take note of the following paragraph in Haqqani’s piece:

Pakistani military intelligence maintains a large “M” (media) wing that threatens mainstream journalists, tries to influence reporting on Pakistan by foreign media and ensures that civilian politicians, journalists and intellectuals who question its narrative of a permanently besieged Pakistani state are projected as agents of a Zionist-Hindu cabal. Islamabad was also an early adopter of fake news sites used to promote everything from the country’s capital to building the image of its top army commander.

With that fresh in our minds, now let us consider another analysis of the Jadhav affair. This is from a piece in The Nation by Waqar K Kauravi and Umar Waqar called ‘Kulsbhushan’s Himmelfahrt‘:

The Kulbhushan enterprise was directly responsible for 1345 killings of innocent Pakistanis and injury to 7500, the financial cost to Pakistan has been approximately 3 billion USDs mainly in lost business and bad perception affecting tourism, sports (cricket), exports and imports; indirect cost may not be ever known.

These are oddly specific numbers, aren’t they? Not ‘thousands’, but exactly 1,345. Where did this number come from? The Army conducted Kulbhushan Jadhav’s trial in complete secrecy, so where did these writers get such details? After some research, the only other reporting of this statistic I could find is from an AP story that quotes two anonymous ‘senior security officials’. However, the AP story was published the same day at the story in The Nation. So did Waqar K Kauravi and Umar Waqar get their information from anonymous ‘senior security officials’ also? If so, why didn’t they say so? And who are these officials?

Maybe the answer can be found in the previous writings of these two. Their recent pieces include:

A piece projecting official narratives of ISI having ‘a global rating of excellence’ and RAW as a threat to ‘Pakistan’s perception management matrix’.

A piece celebrating ‘the heroic contest by Pakistani nation and her soldiers against Indian aggression’.

Are these writers the perfect example of ISI’s ‘M-Wing’ that Haqqani discusses in his piece? Now let us return to the mysterious details provided by Waqar K Kauravi and Umar Waqar’s analysis. Such pieces would be completely unnecessary if another of Haqqani’s points was taken to heart by our state institutions:

Mr. Jadhav’s conviction for espionage would have been more convincing if it had resulted from an open trial.

The facts and evidences from the trial are completely unknown. In fact, the entire affair was carried out behind closed doors and it is not even certain that the government was informed until after it was decided. Details are not coming through official channels, but leaked by anonymous security sources and reported by unknown analysts who only write pieces projecting Army narratives. These reports will be emailed and posted and repeated by hypernationalists, but anyone who dares to show any scepticism will be branded as a sell-out or traitor.

Haqqani concludes that ‘spy games can only make it tougher for the two South Asian neighbors to even explore peace, let alone find it’. Maybe it is his mistake that anyone was looking for peace to begin with.